… is from page 61 of Frank Trentmann’s important 2008 book Free Trade Nation – a book that I thank Walter Grinder for bringing to my attention. In the section of the book from which the following quotation is taken, Trentmann is discussing Joseph Chamberlain’s “Tariff Reform” – an attempt, at the dawn of the 20th century, to move Britain away from a policy of free trade and toward a policy of giving preferential treatment to imports from British colonies as well as protecting British producers from ‘cheap’ foreign goods:
At the time Chamberlain was widely (and rightly) suspected of having given Cecil Rhodes’ men a base from which to launch the invasion that started the war in the Transvaal in 1895. Now, his Tariff Reform crusade appeared the automatic domestic follow-up to imperialist adventures abroad. The combined offer of protection and old age pensions mixed jingoism with bribery.
